ry0wn

http://imgur.com/yiIK87f

I will have the spaghetti. With a side salad. If the salad is on top, I will send it back.

How much did it cost you to buy enough votes to get this post off the ground compared to the 38k+ you bought last time? Considering your comment about how much money you make, was the ROI for this worth it?

Have you ever started a camwhoring thread on /b/? I didn't realize people like you existed in real life.

Great question; thanks for asking. I watched his first /r/IAmA post from a few years ago in real time because, having formal education and professional experience in a related technical field, I was interested. The rate at which that post accrued upvotes didn't make any sense at all for what it offered to /r/IAmA, which was essentially nothing. Most of his comments shilled his fledgeling product, ignoring technical questions while answering softball ones. The number of comments and the number of votes on comments wasn't really changing while the post was rapidly approaching top of the month. The comment karma still doesn't match the post karma.

Compare his post, sitting pretty at around 41.5k upvotes, to other ones from the same month:

• Gordon Ramsay - long-time celebrity chef - 25.9k

• Josh Hutcherson - Peeta from The Hunger Games, one of the most watched movie series of the 2010s - 20.5k

• Philip DeFranco - Philly D, one of the biggest names on YouTube for over a decade - 24.5k

• Ron Jeremy - one of the most famous porn stars of all time - 19.7k

• VSauce - Michael here, famous YouTuber and reddit heartthrob - 17.3k

• Oliver Babish - Binging with Babish, which was a huge deal at the time thanks to reddit - 11.4k

That's just a sample. Don't forget to compare the comment karma on each of those posts, especially Ron Jeremy's: the top comments all have thousands of upvotes more than any of the top comments on OP's original post. This nobody somehow got 41.5k upvotes on a post about nothing. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and perennial global news interest at the time, posted two weeks before OP and got 48.3k upvotes (on a post that was also hella sketchy). Bill Gates, literally the richest man in the world, known by everyone who lives in the first world, got 97.5k upvotes on his fifth AMA post just a month later. This guy whose claim to fame was having 18 months of coding experience got as many upvotes as someone who shook global politics and half as many as Bill fucking Gates.

I do believe that he made his app, and I do believe that he got universities and big companies to use it. I also believe that he's a smart enough guy to combine his educational background with his knowledge of reddit to get his name out there and to push his product to new audiences.